In the 1860s, a few years before Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies at Edinburgh University, there appeared a hugely popular series of books with titles like Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh, The Sliding Scale of Life and The Disclosures of a Detective. They were all the work of one James McLevy, an Edinburgh policeman. In the words of his editor at the time - The name of McLevy is the guarantee of this book. He is known throughout the kingdom for the possession of those many qualities which go to form a successful detective officer. While he is beyond question without a competitor in Scotland, he has very few, if any, in England. The unjustly forgotten McLevy was one of the first exponents of the crime genre and a likely influence on the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His books were based on over 2,000 of his own cases in which he almost always secured a conviction. Uniquely, he was as good a storyteller as he was a sleuth.
His pages are alive with 'thieves, robbers, thimblers, pickpockets, abandoned women and drunken destitutes' and their nefarious activities: 'the swearings, the fights, the drunken brawls, the prostitutions, the blasphemies, the cruelties, and the robberies'. He provides us with a remarkable evocation of Victorian Edinburgh and vivid descriptions of its criminal classes as they move between the very different worlds of the Old and New Towns. Above all, as Quintin Jardine writes in his Foreword,'McLevy's tales more than pass the first and most important test, in that they are an outstandingly good read.'